Louisiana Land Reform in the Storms’ Aftermath

Frank Alexander

W07-9: The goal of planning is to anticipate and to guide. Anticipating is a best guess based upon an understanding of the past. Guiding is making a set of choices about the good for the future. Anticipating tends towards the empirical; guiding tends towards the normative. To engage in planning is to make judgments as we anticipate and as we guide. Our judgments are rarely perfect, not just because we are human, but because the past is only a rough predictor of the future and our conceptions of the good are caught in the constant tension of “Good for Whom?” Nothing focuses our attention as much as a disaster, for a disaster is the quintessential misjudgment about the anticipation and guiding at the core of our planning…